Interviews

Square-Enix Talks Curse of the Crimson Elixer

Taguchi: Right. The structure of the Code Age story is actually being done by the assistant to the FMA cartoonist, Hiromu Arakawa.

GameSpy: This is an anime based game, and in the U.S. there's always a debate over voice acting, Japanese or English. Do you have any plans to offer Japanese voice acting in the U.S.?

Asano: So far there are no plans to do so.

GameSpy: Is that for technical reasons, or ?
blockquote class="contentquote">Asano: There was actually a similar question asked at the Square-Enix Q&A session. It's something that we as a company never looked at seriously, so it's not something we could not answer at this point, and we'll have to see if the market would want it.
GameSpy: The first game was popular but it wasn't a critical success. What kind of improvements did you work on for the second game?

Asano: There are two major points: the first one is that the graphics have been changed to cel shading which looks like the anime itself. The second point is that the action elements are much faster.

GameSpy: It seems like that with the game story taking place during the TV series there can't be a true resolution -- a regular RPG will have an epic story with a very final ending. Is it a challenge to give the game a satisfying ending?

Asano: That certainly is a challenge and as I mentioned we have taken scenes from the first nine episodes, and that flows into its own original story for the game, and that in itself has an ending within it. So in that sense there will be a resolution for the game itself.

GameSpy: Because the series is so popular in the U.S. are you interested in taking advantage of Square-Enix's new multiplatform strategy for the series? And what about next generation plans?

Taguchi: We can't talk about that right now -- we want to concentrate on the current title.

GameSpy: Will the third FMA game come to the U.S.?

Taguchi: Since the release of the game in Japan was based on how the anime series was broadcast in Japan, and that's different in North America, we have to figure out the timing.

GameSpy: Are you happy with the popularity of the whole FMA universe in the U.S.?

Taguchi: The anime series in Japan was actually being aired at 6 PM on Saturdays so that enabled the series to become popular with middle school kids to older than that. In the U.S. the series is being broadcast at around midnight, and we have a limited audience in that sense. We were expecting a larger audience and it would have been better if we could have gotten a larger audience.